Sex workers worry that Threads could kill their business

BlackRose@slrpnk.net to Technology@lemmy.world – 54 points –
fastcompany.com
19

I hope only the porn instances are willing to federate with threads. Maybe then it will help curb the puritanical bs sweeping the US

I mean puritanical bs has been sweeping North America since 1620, why would it stop now? From the outside the US looks like a seething mass of religious nutjobs. Apologies to regular people in the US, I know you exist, you just aren't easily resolved out of the noise of your compatriots.

Doesn't matter if porn instances federate with Threads if Threads will just block that content in their apps, which is the major concern listed in the article.

Does make me wonder how Meta plans to federate Threads and stop the flow of nudes into their app...

AI image detection, ban specifically instances and then probably add their own service that acts as a middleman to filter out individual offenders.

Also probably just defederating from servers that allow unmarked NSFW or are bad at enforcing it. I don't often stumble upon NSFW content on my parts of the fediverse, and if I do it's almost always marked so that it is blurred and could be filtered out.

I fully expect Meta to use AI to help them identify users to block and servers to defederate from though - it's going to be interesting to follow.

If meta's image detection goes anything like tumblr's image detection, I can't even wait.

I specifically follow porn hashtags on my mastodon account, and I don't see all that much NSFW posts. So Meta probably doesn't have that much to worry about.

This is exactly what the Fediverse is for; the sex industry tends to be quite aggressive about adopting new technologies and I expect they'll also do so here. (maybe even an entire alternative cloud of NSFW-friendly instances - people tend to be happy to have separate user accounts for porn consumption anyway)

Switter was the third biggest Mastodon instance when it was open. It was specifically set up by, and to be Sex Worker freindly.
Guess what happened... Laws passed in Australia that made running the instance troublesome, and the hosts couldn't afford to constantly legally defend themselves, so it closed down.

Try and find an instance that welcomes Sex Workers and allows them to advertise. Last time I checked there just isn't one. I'm a photographer that works with Sex Workers, and from what I have seen they will stick with twitter until it is offline, then probably head to bluesky.

OK, but isn’t one of the benefits of federation the ability to base instances in whatever jurisdiction you like? There are plenty of countries where hosting an instance for sex workers is NBD.

Agreed. It really seems like a non-issue as long as one knows the first thing about the fediverse, which is knowledge that stands to increase exponentially in the coming weeks. We already have multiple nsfw instances, and I can mute them if I want to without affecting anyone else.

Then it's just a question of advertising how to get there. If anything, porn will be one of the main drivers behind meta users testing out non-meta instances.

I know that my favorite sex and relationship advise column Savage Love was just kicked off Instagram. I'm sure it's coming to threads